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INTRODUCTION Roughly speaking, we can divide the history of modern computing into the following eras: d 1970s: Timesharing (1 computer with many users) d 1980s: Personal computing (1 computer per user) d 1990s: Parallel computing (many computers per user) Until about 1980, computers were huge, expensive, and located in computer centers. Most organizations had a single large machine. In the 1980s, prices came down to the point where each user could have his or her own personal computer or workstation. These machines were often networked together, so that users could do remote logins on other people's computers or share files in various (often ad hoc) ways. Nowadays some systems have many processors per user, either in the form of a parallel computer or a large collection of CPUs shared by a small user community. Such systems are usually called parallel or distributed computer systems. This devel